I don’t remember where or when I first heard about Aleister Crowley. The first book of his I read was his “Confessions”; I read as much as I could sitting in a college library that I wasn’t supposed to be in, since I wasn’t a student there, waiting for a friend to get out of class. This must have been 1970 or so. The next time I ran into his works was in 1972. I acquired a copy of Magick in Theory and Practice from an auction held to raise money for the McGovern for President campaign. (I worked for the campaign – for a while I was actually paid staff.) The Metaphysical Center and Bookstore on Sutter Street had donated the book, according to the sticker in it. I still have it; the binding is broken from so much use. I read it slowly, trying to understand what was meant by Will. I had very little contact with the occult, magical, or Pagan communities, such as they were at the time. I continued to read whatever I could get my hands on. In 1978, I was initiated into a current of British Traditional Witchcraft. Shortly after that, I moved in with a roommate who had the complete Equinox, and proceeded to read as much of it as I could, as well as all of Dion Fortune’s novels. I went to various and sundry Pagan events. And I discovered gaming.
Sometime in the early ’80’s, I was involved with a group that played “Empire of the Petal Throne” most weekends. This was an elaborate RPG, which is still being played today. Gaming always took place at the apartment of the GM, Jeff. It was actually an upper duplex in a poor neighborhood near the University of Minnesota. We were mostly students, grad students, recent drop-outs, and recent grads with lousy jobs. This was our escape into a luxurious fantasy world.
The event took place on a very hot summer afternoon – late July and early August in Minneapolis can be brutally hot. There was no air conditioning and I think the fan was broken, or just wasn’t enough to cool down the room. We played for a while, but our hearts weren’t in it. We wanted to do something different, but we were hot and broke and bored. Then Anna asked if any of us had ever done a Gnostic Mass. We were fans and pagans and witches and weirdos, but none of us had – except her. There was a very unofficial, very recent OTO group, just a few people, and Anna was one of them. She had the script to the Mass, and wanted to be the Priestess, of course. She went and got the script – she only lived a few blocks away – while the rest of us moved furniture and set things up as best we could. We had no tomb, or super-altar; we had a large chair for the Priestess to sit in. Wine was no problems, but I don’t remember what we used as cakes, probably cookies. Anna didn’t bother putting on robes for the Mass, she was naked from the beginning, so most of us followed her lead and took off our clothes. This made some of the furniture very uncomfortable to sit on.
We had a Priestess and a Priest and a Deacon, none of whom knew the lines very well, all just reading from the script which they handed from person to person. I think it was truncated somehow, because I don’t think we heard all of the Deacon’s speeches. But I remembered bits and pieces of it for a long time, and most of all, communion. One by one, we went up to the Priestess, took wine and cakes from her hands, consumed them, and said, “There is no part of me that is not of the Gods”. Except, being witches and pagans and Goddess worshipers, some of us said “There is no part of me that is not of the Goddess”.
Thus the phrase entered the Minneapolis Pagan community. Later, a friend was meditating on it, “There is no part of me that is not part of the Goddess”. She became distracted, and found herself thinking, “There is no part of me that is not covered in cat hair”. Which, of course, became “There is no part of the Goddess that is not covered in cat hair.” Since she was the founder and for several years the organizer of the local Church of All Worlds Nest, this became one of our mottos.
Much later, I went to my first real Mass, done according to the precepts of the OTO, in Robin’s basement, sometime around 1999. I have been to many since, under many circumstances. But that first one, on a hot summer afternoon, started me on the path of Thelema.
